Gabriel Sargeant

If you’re reading this in the far, far future, The year was 2021 and it got off to a nutty start.

The whole world was watching the US election and that COVID pandemic. And then, as if that wasn’t enough, there was an attempted insurrection in America on 6th of January, 2021.

At this point, I finally broke, and I got a twitter account to watch it all unfold. I was actually meant to be taking a day off work to start a long weekend with my wife. It turned out we both just watched news all weekend.
¯\(ツ)/¯

Over the next few days until Joe Biden got sworn in as the US president, I read a lot of Twitter and news. One facinating thing that was visible during the aftermath of the event, was the groups of people trying to identify the individuals involved. And this wasn’t the police. It was really interesting watching investigative outfits like bellingcat and others scour through the social media putting the clues together.

It’ got me thinking about the future of surveillance software, and anti-facial recognition.

If you look at the following tweet about Zip Tie Guy. It seems that what you wear just another signature that follows you. Just like your actual biometric markers like your face.

It turns out there’s a lot of investigative groups that exist to catalog extremist people and groups in the US.

Zip tie guy was identified because someone was recording every stream that was out there that day, and not only that, there was someone willing to just watch it all. Actually, there were lots of people doing that. Importantly, he didn’t give away his identity at that moment of his crimes. It was when he was back at the hotel booked under his own name celebrating, mask off, with his family. That was the moment that he gave his identity away.

What does all this mean for facial recognition, and recognition tech

I have a finite wardrobe. I don’t have an infinite supply of unique things to wear and carry. I’ve had things like my messenger bag for 10 years. It’s one things that is a signature of me.

It’s clear that facial recognition is the start. But it won’t be the end.

Donning my futurist hat. We will end up with the following technology:

It will consume streams of video data where ever it’s created and broadly identify people. It will catalogue all the things they have on them and then attempt to recognize them against a database of signatures. First it will try to use electronic and telephonic and metadata means to aide in identification of the person. It will work with active scans against facial and biometric landmarks. And then lastly it will look at items of clothing and combinations of those items to build probable matches if the above methods fail.

If a system like this started watching in absence of an event. It could build a catalog of people and their stuff. And then if at some stage, I decided to embark on a life of crime, it could look at everything worn during that crime and build a list of suspects based on the catalog of items seen during the crime. Maybe with Partial glaces of a face etc. God help me If I’m dumb enough to take my phone with me!

What to do about this problem?

I don’t think it can be solved. Someone will eventually build the technology I’m describing. Preventing this sort of surveillance technology from existing can only happen legislatively. And even then, someone will build it and run it covertly.
It’s not practically possible to be ‘unseen’ when you have a mixture of humans and technology scanning for people. So the Dazzle CV is more a fizzle ヽ(。_°)ノ.

Things that will be hard.

For AI, figureing out if that orange glob of pixels is a coat, or a pair of pants. That’s going to be tough, but not impossible.

In the mean time, before AI catalogues everything you do, your phone still is a bigger threat to you identity than your face.